[XeTeX] polyglossia and french

[Alan Munn]

On Sep 24, 2011, at 8:07 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 22:55, Alan Munn wrote:
>> On Sep 24, 2011, at 3:34 PM, rhino64 at postmail.ch wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi All,
>>>    When typesetting documents in french with polyglossia,
>>> a space is added before double punctuation signs (like !:?...).
>>> 
>>> This is normal in french typography used in France. However,
>>> here in Switzerland, it is more usual to not use this
>>> extra space.
> /.../
>> There's a command \nofrench at punctuation which turns off all the French related punctuation.
> /.../
>> So to selectively turn off the special spacing for particular characters, redefine this command by commenting out the lines that correspond to spacing that you wish to keep, and then issue the command to turn of the uncommented ones.
> 
> I don't know anything about French in Switzerland, but if such a usage
> is common, it makes more sense to add an option to Polyglossia to
> switch French spacing off with a package option/language-specific
> setting instead of resorting to low level commands.

True, but this is how such an option would be created, no?  So it might be as simple as creating a gloss-suisse.ldf modeled after gloss-french.ldf which omits the unneeded spacings as I suggested.

Alan

-- 
Alan Munn
amunn at gmx.com